I think there may be at least one good, non-obvious, argument against this, but I prefer not to go into it.
We should start with all of the people in favor of this since they like it so much. People like to bring stuff like this up and then like to volunteer other people for the experiment. Lots of sick people in this world.
LOL So much for an unbiased opinion...... you've got got skin in the game. I heard this was a HUGE black eye for all clean energy from *real* nonbiased experts. Also hearing it's one of the main reasons TSLA has been getting crushed. It's a wake up call and now we all know damn well the potential danger is to an over-reliance on this crap.
I get that it's easy to read headlines and get jaded. There are some things we know as facts though. For example, we know that CO2 levels before the industrial revolution where 280 ppm, they are now 409 ppm. We know that an increase of that level in that short of a time period is an unprecedented experiment with our global climate. There's two ways to look at that. My way is to ask anyone willing to conduct such an experiment to show there's convincing evidence it won't cause major changes that will impact all of us and if they can't we should do our best to mitigate it. You seem to advocate that we have to prove it causes changes beyond a reasonable doubt and until then should do nothing. Kind of like if a factory set up next door to your house and started blowing out a chemical that hadn't been produced before. I would insist that they show it was safe before they started releasing it, you're saying to just wait until I get cancer before deciding if we should control the release of that chemical. But its even worse because climate change deniers are actively attempting to stop any research into climate change. That's saying not only to wait until the chemical plant gives you cancer, but actively prevent anyone from studying if it causes cancer in the interim! That ignore it and stop everyone from even asking the question approach seems, unwise, at best. It seems especially foolish when we've come so rapidly down the cost curve that unsubsidized solar plus storage is now coming in on 20 year arms length PPAs at costs cheaper than fossil fuel. Forget climate change, do you actually like to pay more money than you have to for sulfur dioxide in the air just to stick it to the environmentalists? I grew up in the PNW in a logging community in the 1980s and my father was a forester, so I know more than your random guy about the spotted owl controversy. You're seem to be conflating concerns about climate change with the very narrow goal of environmentalist at that time and place to stop a very specific type of logging (old growth forests) on federal lands, for wood that we didn't actually even need, where the government was effectively giving this wood away to logging companies. The two had nothing to do with one another. And guess what, we did stop logging in federal old growth forests, it had zero impact on the U.S. lumber and paper markets, the spotted owl is doing much better as a result, and we still have millions of acres of beautiful PNW are spectacular old growth forests that would take hundreds of years to reproduce rather than ugly 30 year old clear cuts. And all my classmates from high school who seemed to think the only job in the world was logging old growth forests? All doing just fine. It's absolutely baffling to me how anyone could not only be against that outcome, but actually angry about it? It's especially baffling to me that you're one of those people. I get it if you're an ignorant redneck whose worldview consists of Fox and now OAN and Newsmax. But you're none of those things. It's like you had some kind of trauma in this area as a kid and it makes you irrationally angry and just plain irrational, but just about this one narrow thing. Any other subject I may not agree with you but I have no doubt that you're being intelligent, thoughtful, and well meaning. The juxtaposition is just strange.
You're right. If we have questions about a medical issue, by all means we can't rely on a doctor's opinion because they've got skin in the game. We need to listen to @athlonmank8 instead. Want to discuss the 737 MAX issue, definitely don't ask an aeronautical engineer or pilot, they've got skin in the game. You gotta go with some random jackass on the internet instead. And so on. This cult of willful ignorance is ridiculous.
Absolutely right. Of course, the industrialized world already has sub-replacement fertility. On the other hand, sub-Saharan Africa's population is going to explode by 400%, to roughly four billion by the end of the century, barring the intervention of catastrophic famine or other disasters on a scale unprecedented in recorded history. It's the most important fact in the world. Now, if human affairs were managed according to rational principles, this issue would be completely dominating all public discourse at least as much as the CO2 stuff. As it is, nobody in the elite class wants to risk being accused of racism so we just get silence. I'm not that old, but I'm sure glad I won't live to see 2100.
That shows that 32 GW of wind was operating at a capacity factor of 16% which converts to 5.35 GW operating at 100% capacity factor. If you looked up the expected winter capacity factor for wind in ERCOT you would see it was 19.4% which translates to 6.2 GW at 100% capacity factor (Winter summary tab of the Capacity, Demand and Reserves Report December 2020 at Resource Adequacy (ercot.com). That means that on the day you listed, wind was contributing 6.2-5.35=.85 GW less than expected under ERCOT's resource adequacy planning, or 13% less than it was planned to contribute. This is the fundamental concept you are either willfully or just ignorantly failing to grasp, wind never plans or claims to produce anything near it's nameplate, therefore comparing wind nameplate to thermal nameplate in a resource adequacy discussion is pure idiocy! On the other hand, thermal power was expected to be able to provide 67.5 GW of capacity. It actually provided a peak of roughly 49.5 GW on Feb 15th (2-Day Real Time Gen and Load Data Report backing out non-thermal resources), which is 67.5-57.2=18 GW less, or 26% less than it was planned to contribute. So the actual data shows that while all resources underperformed their planned capacity under ERCOT's capacity reserve margin calculation on the day you picked, thermal plants underperformed by literally twice as much. And more importantly, since thermal plants make up a much bigger part of the grid, their shortfall impacted the grid by a factor of 21X more than the wind shortfall (.85 GW shortfall from wind versus 18 GW shortfall from thermal)! So no, the numbers you produced don't support your assertions in the least, they actually support exactly the opposite to a stunning degree. They do demonstrate your gross ignorance of how nameplate capacity is adjusted by capacity factors in resource planning, not to mention your general ignorance of anything related to resource planning. Most folks would take the opportunity to learn from someone who clearly knows a bunch about something and was willing to take the time to explain it. The only question is if you're someone who values intellectual growth, or lives in a cult of ignorance?